As many 600 million Samsung phones may have a security flaw that could allow hackers to monitor the camera and microphone, read incoming and outgoing text messages, and install malicious apps. Fortunately, Samsung says it will release a fix in a few days.
When was the last time your computer crashed? How long has it been since you needed to take your car to the repair shop? The answer to both of these questions is probably not that long. What brings these seemingly unrelated points to mind is this: Google's been trumpeting the safety record of its driverless cars, and the media's been falling all over itself to herald a new automotive era.
When it comes to wireless tracking and electronic spying, paranoia is often the right response. Not always, though. Case in point: The rather hysterical flap over beacons, which use Bluetooth technology to detect nearby mobile devices and deliver advertisements and other related content. You'd think the little devices were something out of a sci-fi movie, ready to track your every move and send the data to the Dark Powers that be.
Deborah Hall-Lefevre is making the biggest bet of her 23-year IT career.
Meet the latest telecom buzzword: VoLTE, short for Voice over Long Term Evolution (LTE).
If you're like me, you probably wondered why Facebook forced everyone to use its Messenger app for chat. (Well, technically it didn't force people to use the app, it forced people who want to send Facebook messages to use the app.) Wonder no more. As is often the case with Facebook, the answer is money. Facebook is reportedly gearing up to enable mobile payments within Messenger.
I frequently tell my readers to complain, complain, complain if they feel like they've been wronged by a service provider. I'm sure I sometimes sound like a broken record. (I know, old-school metaphor.) But guess what -- it works...at least occasionally.
Are you happy with your recently-purchased computer? If not, you're in good company. Consumer satisfaction with laptops and desktops has been sliding for a couple of years now, and PCs made by Hewlett-Packard are drawing the most ire, according to the latest edition of the University of Michigan's American Consumer Satisfaction Index.
Most of us have experienced the "career creepies," those moments of intense anxiety about our place in the work world. I had one of those a few months ago when The Associated Press said it would use computer-generated stories to supplement its coverage of corporate earnings announcements. Yikes! If a writer isn't safe from automation, who is?
Those apps you download on your smartphone may be free or very cheap, but there's a hidden price you should be aware of: loss of privacy.
As a consumer advocate my heart is with Aereo, a startup that uses tiny antennas (pictured below) to capture broadcast airwaves and stream those signals to users who pay about $8 a month. But as a "content creator" my head is with the broadcasters and the Supreme Court on this one.
From the social network in business to the 'success' of the Chromebook to the launch of iTV, the pundits got it wrong, wrong, wrong
From heads-up displays to implantable silicon, a brave new business world of innovative wearable tech is fast taking shape
It's not a myth. The technology industry is in the midst of a hiring surge stronger than any we've seen since the days of the dot-com boom. InfoWorld's interviews with economists, technology executives, job seekers, and hiring board managers indicate that employment in the tech sector is up a solid 10 percent this year - by some bullish estimates, closer to 20 percent. And despite the tendency of the media to fixate on California's Silicon Valley, the hottest job markets are in places like New York and Washington, D.C., where firms in financial services and the federal government hire droves of IT hands.
If you read much about tech, you've undoubtedly been told by some snarky writer that if you're not headed for the cloud, you're hopelessly unhip, behind the times, and probably overweight. You know -- the cloud, that repository of all things digital contained on giant servers owned by someone else out there in cyberspace.